The Conversion of a Sinner

I

THIS is a record of personal experience. It is not a system of philosophy nor a theological creed. I make no pretense of proof of the beliefs I state because they are not conclusions reached by conscious logical mental processes. I think them true for me because they produce certain results; they give me more vitality and power and a keener zest for life. They may not be true for any other man, but, unless I am wholly different from all other men, they must contain some truth or light for them.

I begin with the story of another man.

I knew him for several years only as we know our business associates, the men whom we see often at Directors’ and Executive Committee meetings; a thin-faced, alert, courteous gentleman, with a deep wrinkle between the eyes and dark circles under them; a mind keen as a rapier, stored with knowledge of life and men, and illuminated with flashes of cynical humor. But it was not until I crossed the continent with him on a tour of corporation inspection that I saw the real man. Revelation began on the train with his humorous side-thrust at my third volume of Gibbon’s ‘Decline and Fall,’which struck him, an up-state New Yorker, as typical of my Puritan descent, and for long thereafter he used to greet me daily with the question, ‘Still Declining and Falling?’ To which I had no apt repartee in view of the undoubted fact that I found the volume of The Devil’s Paw, by E. Phillips Oppenheim, to which he was wedded, far more amusing.

And then his game of bridge! It was of the fierce predatory type, for a high stake, which sent me ‘to the mat’ in the second round, hopelessly outclassed. To miss a possible trick caused him a sharp pang, and he rarely did it. But I first caught him without his mask on a morning when, after a night in a small country hotel of western Oregon, I saw him get out of bed — or, rather, the ghost of him. Hollow-eyed, with cheeks fallen in and a temper about as genial as that of a bald hornet, he offered no vestige of a salutation until, after bolting three cups of black coffee and cursing the bellboy because it was not strong enough, he was moved to say, ‘Cabot, I can remember the time when one cup of coffee with my breakfast would set me up for the day. Now three on an empty stomach just bring my head above water.’

That was the man without his mask, and I was shocked but hardly surprised to hear, three years later, that he was dead, having been killed by the overturning of his motor while running at the high speed habitual to him.

The incident was shocking but surprise was unwarranted, for the thing was not really an accident: it was implicit in his life. But ten years had elapsed before its full significance dawned upon me. Then, in that incident I saw myself and some millions of my fellow countrymen mirrored to the life. It was really the picture of a man whose world was not ‘God’s perfect Universe,’ but, in sober fact, a Hell from which his craving to escape drove him to excitement in various forms, of which three cups of black coffee before breakfast were perhaps the most effective and the least harmful. As with most powerful business men in America to-day, his business was not a trade nor an intellectual pursuit, but a game of wild excitement, played day and night, not for money or the advancement of knowledge or the benefit of mankind, but for the excitement of the game itself; and his so-called amusements — bridge, literature, and motoring — were mere variations of the same thing. His whole life was one huge gamble — which he ultimately lost.

The class to which he belonged is limited, but the morbid craving which drove him on can be seen on every hand. Take, for example, the industrial worker. A large fraction of his time and all his savings are spent on strikes which, in the last analysis, amount to a declaration that his life, also, is in Hell and that he won’t stand it any longer. And this in the face of the fact that his material condition or ‘standard of living’ is unequaled in the world’s history.

Nor is this condition confined to men. Their women-folk, whose natural life is housekeeping, homemaking, and the care of their children, are on strike, too, declaring such work to be ‘sordid and degrading,’ and seeking escape from it by every means in their power.

All these human souls exhibit the same craving to escape from the slavery of their lives, and they have tried every form of excitement to satisfy their craving, only to find that like all stimulants they make the craving worse.

No one will deny that relaxation and amusement are necessary for us all; but, in order to see clearly the change which has taken place, compare our forms of amusement with those of fifty years ago. In literature, painting, and music, the classics of our grandfathers are pronounced dull and slow to-day and things with ‘more snap to them,’ as we phrase it, have taken their place. Not beauty but excitement is what we crave, and this not alone in our sedentary relaxations. In the out-of-doors world our grandfathers, of a Sunday afternoon or on week-days, as opportunity offered, strolling in the woods and fields, acquired an intimacy with the trees, birds, and flowers, which they prized; or they hitched the fat old horse into the carryall, loaded in their children and women-folk, and jogged along the quiet roads at an average of four miles an hour. To-day the woods and fields are deserted, except for the hunter, strung with the thirst to kill, while ten million motor-cars whirl us at blinding speed, over crowded thoroughfares on which we dodge our neighbors with incredible agility and fierce irritation, returning home dazed and exhausted with a record of one hundred miles or so between luncheon and dinner.

If these things be relaxing to the nerves and elevating to the spirit, human nature has changed indeed! They have the earmarks of stimulants, not sedatives; of the fear of life, rather than the love of it. Foreign observers have often remarked with a touch of humor that Americans work hard and hurry over their play. But this is not hurry; it is hysteria — a sort of spiritual madness.

This is the condition of our world which all men recognized — all men, it seemed, except myself. Slower than most to see the obvious, I am, however, more impatient of a mystery. Most social phenomena have an ascertainable cause or origin. What is the origin of this universal madness?

Physicians and the public-health authorities do, it is true, report an increase in diseases of the nervous system and deaths from heart disease. But the increase is not very great and is wholly insufficient to account for such a condition of mind as we see about us. For this condition is nationwide; a large fraction of our population is affected; clearly this is not exactly a case for the doctors of medicine. We must look elsewhere. Here are some straws that may show where the wind is.

II

A profound political observer is said to have remarked, many centuries ago, ‘He who believeth doth not make haste’; which, being interpreted, means that the man who has a clear purpose in his life, and a firm grasp upon his work, is the master of it, not the sport of circumstance, driven hither and yon by every change of wind. The man who is always in a hurry is the slave of his work.

A recent article by an eminent economist in a well-known quarterly has developed at some length the proposition that the mechanical devices which man has produced have now become so powerful that they have taken command of his material world and made him their servant and their slave. And this is true. Our machines do govern us; the material has overwhelmed the spiritual. The mechanical genius of America has evolved the marvel of ‘quantity production,’by which wonderful combinations of machines turn out their product with incredible volume and cheapness. But the men who feed the machines do so at the price of body and soul. The destruction of these things which we cannot replace is not included in the cost of production. Our captains of industry figure depreciation on their machines, but not on their men. If the depreciation of human souls were included in the cost, ‘quantity production’ would lose its charm for them, because it would not be cheap.

Quantity production and ‘the dominion of machines’ are not, however, inventions of our Western world; they are expedients to which we have been forced by the drying-up of the springs of our spiritual life. The workingman from whom the ‘joy of labor’ has taken flight, has sought refuge in high living — which he miscalls a high standard of living and which involves high wages to support it. It is in the struggle to avoid a ‘labor cost’ so high that it would stop production and reduce us to beggary that our complex mechanical and industrial system originated. The root cause is our spiritual poverty, and if Labor now suffers from ‘the dominion of machines,’ the fault lies at its own door. But, unless some remedy for this can be devised, our machines will wreck our civilization by destroying the race.

And moreover it is clear that this poverty of spiritual life, or loss of Faith, is not confined to America. All Christendom is affected. For note well that the World War was not the special crime of any group of individuals, or of any one nation. Europe drifted into that war because of lack of leadership among nations whose material resources and power had wholly outgrown their spiritual control. And the civilization of Europe to-day, four years after the Armistice, is, according to the most competent observers, upon the verge of collapse. Without Faith the nations perish.

Here then perhaps we have our clue. The conditions which we see around us are conditions of disease, and it is disease of the soul rather than of the body.

Look now at a concrete example: the conditions, material and spiritual, in our American world which drove my friend to his death, had driven me. after twenty-five years of battle, to the verge of it. My soul, like his, had for many years been fed on stimulants and sawdust, and in a final revolt it wreaked its vengeance upon my body, which soon went down in defeat. For eight years more, however, I refused to see it so; fought stubbornly against disease with all the weapons which medical science could provide, but without any real success. I contrived, it is true, to keep myself alive by a system of fierce repression which required me to give up all the normal pleasures of life and almost all human society. But the achievement was of more than doubtful value, so far as I can see, and was due more to the instinct to cling to mere life than to an intelligible purpose.

Early last summer I became interested in considering the power and operation of the subconscious mind, and perceived how much more active, powerful, and important its processes are than those of which we are conscious, known as intellect and will. The examples of the stone and the bicycle and of the six-inch plank in the floor vs. the six-inch girder on the skyscraper as footpaths showed the superiority of the subconsciousness to the will; while the quest for the forgotten word demonstrated its faultless memory. The superior quality in some persons of the thinking processes during sleep interested me because it was not true apparently of every one. Then I learned that some healers made their ‘suggestions’ at night, and remembered that hypnotic influence was based upon a condition resembling sleep in the patient. I read that M. Coué affirmed that cure by autosuggestion was highly effective; that the suggestions should be made night and morning, and without effort of will.

Of course, the reaction of the soul on the body (malignant or beneficent) had been observed and preached for two thousand years or more. In my own case, I found that if I instructed myself in spoken words, at night, just before going to sleep, as to the problems to be dealt with and the pitfalls to be avoided on the next day, great improvement in conduct and achievement could be produced.

After following this procedure for a short time, it came to me that what I was saying was tending to ‘degenerate’ into prayer, a form of begging to which I had never fallen; and then, with a real shock, that the times of prayer from time immemorial had been morning and evening, the very times fixed by Coué for autosuggestion. Moreover, the method of Coué and the method of prayer taught by the Church were strikingly similar. Both rested their healing power on belief, conviction, faith-—the surrender or subordination of the will being a first essential.

It then came to me that from the time of Zeno, at least, men of spiritual insight had perceived and declared that God was within us; that the human soul was a part of God; and that it should be sought and would be found within and not without.

With these notions in my head, I looked curiously about me for evidence which would refute or support these assumptions, and this struck me as significant. As a whole, the American people appear to fair-minded outsiders to be remarkably unspiritual, material, practical — far more so than their ancestors. In other words, the tendency of the nation—or, at least, of the upper classes — seemed to be toward materialism, toward building up the mind at the expense of the soul. Such a process would result from starving the soul and feeding the mind, and if, as it seemed to me, the soul and the socalled subconsciousness were closely allied, or were one it was of vital importance how men spent the last hours before sleep.

Then the remarkable development and spread of the American newspaper hit me, and I realized that although, a hundred years ago, good men read their Bibles before going to bed, to-day they read the newspaper, play bridge or billiards at the Club or after overeating at a friend’s house, and, in the morning, get up tired and cross and go to their city business. Obviously, if the soul is nocturnal and has to be fed night and morning, it is being fed on chaff, and the starvation or atrophy which our critics discern is exactly what we should expect.

This idea was supported in my own case by great increase in calmness and poise following a change of routine which put the evening paper before supper and the Bible or its spiritual equivalent after.

Toward the end of August, upon the verge of despair, I went up to my camp in the Connecticut Valley for two weeks of so-called rest, taking along a liberal supply of the ‘very light’ novels on which I was accustomed to feed, and, by accident, a little book on the Meaning of Prayer¹ which a dear friend had given me to read.

It was August, the weather was rather hot and muggy, life looked very bleak, though fortunately not very long, for me, and the novels for a space went well. But after a few days even E. Phillips Oppenheim could not hold my attention, and one hot morning, throwing down the book in despair, my eye fell on the Meaning of Prayer. I began to browse on it with a vacant mind which rapidly changed to an absorption so complete that I was keenly annoyed by the arrival of lunchtime, three hours later. That afternoon I went back to Oppenheim but, finding him intolerable, took up again The Meaning of Prayer with a rather sheepish feeling to be reading such a book. The hours of the afternoon, however, vanished as those of the morning, and supper was another unwelcome interruption — a remarkable fact for a man living on a starvation diet, in whom the pangs of hunger were never quenched.

After supper I sat down to think. This thing looked serious. Here was I for the first time in my life bored with novels and absorbed in worship. Was this the first stage of conversion or the madness which precedes death?

III

After a few days of this sort, during which I experimented and examined my sensations with scientific coldness, I was convinced that I was not mad. Something different was in process. It seemed that in worship, or prayer, and in my Bible, the solution to the riddle of my universe had been revealed to me; for I was living in a new world of peace, beauty, and gladness, such as I had never conceived. I was devouring the Sacred Books with the hunger of a starving man; the material world with its harassing duties, dangers, and excitements had faded on the horizon, and my wreck of a body (to maintain which in operation at all had been taking most of my time and all of my will-power) seemed a wholly secondary matter which was looking after itself very well.

That condition has continued except that I have returned to the world of men, taken up again my daily chores with the keenest interest and with a sureness of touch and an absence of worry and excitement to which all my associates can testify, and my health has continued to improve in a remarkable way. My experience was, I think, a sort of ‘conversion,’though not of the usual type; for subsequent reading has taught me that the sensations of genuine conversion of the explosive type, such as often occurs to those in middle life, are so ecstatic and ineffable as to be beyond the power of man to describe. Certainly it has never been done. Adjective is piled on adjective, as Ossa on Pelion, but no clear picture results; and as to what might be called normal conversion, of the sort which comes to thousands during adolescence, it is apparently such an easy and painless process as to escape observation, and so descriptive analysis, in most cases. I conclude, therefore, that mine was not a genuine conversion, for the process was perfectly conscious and easily described.

Sitting in my great cool living-room, with the humming of the bees and the sound of the river in my ears; rowing on the river at sunrise; mowing my grass or weeding my garden, or even while putting on my boots, ideas would pop into my mind and automatically fit themselves in with other ideas like the pieces of a picture puzzle. Sometimes they took places apparently without reference to the ideas already there, and for days would hang in space so to speak. But gradually the gaps were filled in and the picture became complete.

At the time, the process seemed miraculous and I had the feeling of being controlled by an external power; but, as I was spending much time in reading the Bible, The Meaning of Prayer, Varieties of Religious Experience, and other books on philosophy, I now see that the ideas gleaned from these books and sinking into my subconscious mind were simply reappearing after the process of assimilation had reached a certain stage. My mind wandered very much, concentration was never achieved, and it is certain that no reasoning process produced the final result. It was mainly subconscious, but, by a gradual process extending over some weeks, a clear picture was produced, the picture of the relation of my soul to all other souls, and thus to the Whole, the Infinite, or God — Who is the sum of all.

I use the word picture and refer to it as ‘seen,’ but it is a thing of feeling and not of vision, a synthesis or harmony of the universe, which belongs rather in the realm of music. Life is like a great chorus in which each soul has its certain place. If it finds that place and fills it, it is happy and successful — it lives in Heaven; otherwise it is unhappy and lives in Hell.

Our modern world has its gains as well as its losses, and one of the gains is that it has accustomed us to miracles and we see them for what they are — merely as effects, of which we do not know the cause, but which produce results on which we can rely. My conversion, therefore, while miraculous, did not excite me, for even at first it seemed far more credible and normal than the atomic theory, for example, or electrical phenomena, such as alternating currents, telephones, and wireless; and, as I have examined at more leisure and with more thoroughness what took place, I think I see in it the normal working of cause and effect, based upon laws which are of twin birth with man; a part of the Law of the universe, but one which each of us must painfully rediscover for himself. The truth which has always been known had just dawned upon me, namely, that there is a material body and a spiritual body; that the spiritual body, in other words the soul, must be tended and fed as well as the material body, and that worship of God by prayer is the method by which it is fed. Without such feeding it will die and, in my case, a starved or ill-nourished soul had produced almost fatal reactions upon my body. The results, therefore, which we see on every hand, of feeding our souls on stimulants and sawdust, — namely, disease and death, — seem to me exactly what we should expect, and the miracles of healing by Christian faith are the normal working of cause and effect. For I take the heart of that faith to be that belief in God, shown by love and obedience to His will, gives men the power to draw strength and life from God.

And there is another way of stating the same thing which I find useful. If I assume that God is Love, Goodness, and Truth, — or, if you prefer, the Harmony of the universe, — I find that He is also Life. For Love, Goodness, and true ideas in the mind do, I find, give me vitality and working power. I find, for example, — and so do other men, — that worship revives and invigorates me, while anger, hatred, and jealousy exhaust and depress. In short, God is Truth and Truth is Life, while sin and error are untruth and so ‘not Life.’ So far as action is governed by fear or sin it tends to become automatic, a reflex from a false premise in the subconscious, and to that extent the soul has atrophied and died; while action based on true spiritual motives makes the soul more alert, that is, more alive. Sin is a perversion of the soul, like cancer in the cells of the body, and if not eradicated it will slowly eat its way through the whole structure and kill it.

The Christian faith, put at its very lowest, is a working hypothesis like the Law of Gravity, the theories of electricity, astronomy, and physics. In all these cases, if the hypothesis works, by explaining the facts we observe, we adopt and use it. These are acts of faith and appear to me more questionable, far less supported by evidence and far more difficult to believe than the Christian’s faith in God. Our faith in God, in the power of His love, and in the life-giving results of obedience and surrender to His will, is supported by the whole history and experience of man. It has been tested and proved, not hundreds but literally millions of times. If evidence from experience can prove anything, it has proved this. It is really amazing what hard work we make of it. Men are skeptical about God because they cannot see him. It is quite respectable to be so. But are they skeptical about an ‘alternating current,’ or a telephone message, or an atom, because they cannot see it? They would not dare to say so. Times have changed. Five hundred years ago the position was exactly reversed. To confess skepticism about God would send a man to the stake, while all respectable persons thought Columbus was crazy and that of course the world was flat. Now we seem to be ruled by science and machinery. A man may be as skeptical as he will about the power of God, or what is far worse, may not bother his head about it in any least degree; but to question the atomic theory or the law of gravity or the justice of the prevailing industrial system will cause his neighbors to shake their heads.

To-day we deify the intellect and are skeptical about God; but the mystic of the Middle Ages was an example of skepticism of another sort. We usually class as skeptics the men of high intelligence and learning who worship the mind and doubt the existence of God because the mind cannot grasp and express Him; while the mystic, seeing the proof of God in the whole universe about him, and the wisdom of yesterday proved the folly of to-day, was skeptical about the power of the intellect to grasp and describe the Infinite, but believed in God because he saw His works.

And, therefore, it is clear to me that, the true remedy — in fact, the only one — for the ills from which we suffer is a revival of our faith in God. Our lives are torn to rags and tatters by the whirling nebulæ of disconnected activities which fill our days, resulting so often in a final explosion from the centrifugal forces generated by such rapid rotation. Vivid faith will centralize or polarize our lives, giving them a central motive — the service of God — which will unify our efforts, making them more effective and relieving us of the killing strain of heterogeneous action. Faith will construct for each of us the great girders binding the rim of the wheel to its centre, which will be strong enough to resist the pull of centrifugal forces and enable the machine to do its work.

The miracles of science are ‘seen’ by their results, which we accept without question. We believe them, we say, because they work. But does not our belief in God ‘work’? I believe it to be the most dynamic thing in the world! It works more, and more powerfully, than all the works of man. Millions have put it to the test of experience and their lives testify to its truth. What more could be asked in God’s name or the Devil’s? No law of which we have any conception is so completely and convincingly proved. No rational man, therefore, it seems to me, who will give his mind to it and will examine the evidence, can remain in doubt that God is the source of life and that by faith — that is, love and obedience to His will — man can draw life from that source. The reason that so many men doubt is because they have never looked at the evidence. It is time they did.

IV

But how shall we achieve and hold to our faith? Discussions of this problem are as old as man, being discoverable in the oldest books of the Bible, in the teachings of the Greek philosphers, in the Neo-Platonists, in the writings of the Fathers of the Church, and of all the mystics. But each generation prefers to restate its truths, and the discussion best suited to the need of our times, as I see it, is in Hocking’s book, The Meaning of God in Human Experience.

Briefly stated, what Hocking says is this. There is in this universe a God all-powerful and all-wise, and the existence of man depends upon so regulating or tuning the individual life as to act in harmony with the divine plan. It is the will of God that man should devote much of his time in this world to accomplishing material work; but God’s universe is so devised that, too great absorption in material ideas, as the result of which they come to be regarded as ends in themselves, produces a subtle poison, or toxin, which saps man’s energy, makes these ends appear worthless and thus deprives life of its zest. This is a necessary result of the fact that man, being human, all his efforts must contain a certain coefficient of error which, if allowed to continue for too long a time without correction, will make his course wholly wrong and all his efforts futile. The way to correct the error, the antidote or antitoxin for the poison, is to set aside for a time all material work, and to concentrate attention on God, the spiritual centre of the universe. Just as the sea captain corrects his course by daily observations of the sun, the centre of the solar system, so man must correct his course at frequent intervals by transferring his attention to God by means of worship or prayer. After the corrections have been made — that is, after God has indicated to him his true course — man’s attention must be retransferred to the temporal world and its material duties. This transfer and retransfer is the principle of alternation so illuminatingly stated in Hocking’s book.

It seems to me, therefore, that the method or technique by which this is accomplished must be the most important study of man; for in proportion to the completeness of his success in devising a method for real communion with God will be his power to tune his life in harmony with the Law of God, with the consequent ability to draw that vitality and power to make himself a useful servant, which is the purpose of life and the only source of happiness and success.

Unfortunately the human soul is the most lonely thing of which we can conceive. No ‘communion of souls’ is possible in the deepest sense — only communion with God. No human soul can touch any other soul except through the medium of God, so that the method of communion or worship must be unique for each individual and he must discover it for himself. But there are certain general principles which are of universal validity and which are the foundation on which the individual may build. All are as old as man and antiquity is the proof of their validity. But modern science has done much to explain their origin and force and should be accepted for what it can give. The fact that our material and mechanical discoveries may for the moment have overwhelmed us should not blind us to their value. An all-wise God has not willed these developments without a purpose. Our spiritual progress is temporarily in arrears, but the day will dawn when we shall have regained such spiritual mastery as will put these machines in their proper place.

Now the practice of worship by prayer can be approached in many ways, and nothing is more striking, or at first more baffling, than the different ways in which praying men approach it. One of the hindrances most often met with is the argument of those who think of prayer as asking for things, that a wise and loving God knows what we need before we ask for it, and will give us what is good for us. But we must remember that in communion with God, as with individuals, ‘the question which has not been asked cannot be answered.’ Until we are prepared to receive God’s gift, that is, until the thing we ask for has become a dominant desire of our lives, our prayer for it cannot be answered. We may pray for an understanding of God’s love, but until we have firmly grasped the meaning of the Commandment ‘Thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself, ‘ and have an earnest desire to obey it, our prayer for the needful strength must go unanswered.

It is in this aspect of prayer that modern psychology can help us. From time immemorial men have prayed morning and evening and now we know the reason why. Most of our actions and all of the internal functions of our bodies are controlled, not by the intellect and the will, but by the subconscious. The spring of action, whether in our daily judgments or in our digestive metabolism, is inaccessible to the intellect and the will except through the subconscious. The subconscious holds the key. We can, in fact we must, communicate with the subconscious through the intellect controlled by will; all action by the subconscious must originate in the conscious mind, but the conscious mind cannot control the act. It is to the application of this law that the miracles of healing by suggestion and faith are due, and moreover it has recently been proved that there are what might be called tides in the subconscious; that is, that there are times at which it is nearer to the surface or more accessible than at others, and that for most people these times are morning and evening — the ancient times of prayer.

The value of this principle in its application to prayer is this: in order to get our dominant desire made effective in our lives, we must use the subconscious; an important aspect of prayer is the clear and explicit instruction of the subconscious as to what we intend to be our dominant, desire in order that it may be accomplished. I find, therefore, that for me an important part of the preparation for worship is the soliloquy, night, and morning, in which I definitely instruct my subconscious as to the results of my conscious thinking about my daily life. Before praying for grace to love our neighbors we must first grasp what we mean by that, wherein we fail, and what is in fact our dominant desire about it. This desire we must clearly communicate to the subconscious to be made effective. Then our prayer for the needed grace can be and will be answered — but not before.

And there is another way in which the new psychology has enlightened me. The great class of mental disorders from which men suffer, known as the phobias, can often, we are now told, be attacked successfully if the cause of the fear can be discovered. The destructive power of fear seems to be due to the fact that it originates in instinct and is not grasped by the mind. If the origin of the phobia can be dragged out into the sunlight of the mind, it loses its power and dies like the disease-germ when exposed to the sun. And this same principle can be applied, I think, to our sins and false ideas, by soliloquy or prayer. Self-examination and confession are in fact the ancient application and use of this principle which we have just discovered.

This is supported by what we know of the practice of the men who have made prayer the most powerful agent or working force in their lives. ‘Chinese’ Gordon, for example, writes, ‘This morning I dragged Agag out into the presence of the Lord and hacked him to pieces’ — Agag being used by him for a symbol of his own worldly ambitions.

Of course, soliloquy of this sort is not exactly prayer; it is rather the preparation for prayer by laying the foundation for dominant desire, but such a dominant desire, expressed in the constant work of our lives, is a prerequisite of worship and effective prayer.

I think we must admit that the verbal prayers of confession, humiliation, and self-abasement resemble soliloquy more than prayer, and they must be practised with discretion. For the sick soul to dwell upon its sickness is likely to make the sickness worse by concentrating too much attention on it. Mind cure, or the religion of healthy-mindedness is most vital for the sick — which explains the well-known fact that only the very saintly should dwell upon their sins. But that such prayers may be very helpful and profoundly important is proved by the calming and cleansing reaction which they certainly produce, so that perhaps we ought not to be too critical in making an exact distinction.

The miraculous cures that have been accomplished by the disciples of mindcure, Christian Science, and autosuggestion seem to me to result from a method which is in fact common to all of them, although it has been obscured by superficial differences which have been overemphasized. Each of them has developed a formula or method by which the mind of the patient is concentrated on the conception of health, at times and in ways which successfully transfer this image to the seat of action in the subconscious. This concentration is the secret of their success, and I am tempted to believe that the miracles of healing of all times rest upon the same foundation. The simplest and perhaps most effective example is the formula of M. Coué repeated twenty times night and morning.

Now it is impossible for me to doubt that if the same concentration can be achieved in Christian prayer, similar but more far-reaching curative results will be produced. I hold that the great problem for each of us in developing the technique of prayer is to ascertain exactly by what method such concentration upon the symbols of his faith can be produced in his individual soul.

V

Our daily prayer, however, and the method of preparation for it, is not, I think, the most important form of worship by means of prayer. The deepest form of worship is communion with God in order that our souls may be fed and the course of our lives directed in true accord with His will. For this the ‘Seeing Eye’ and the ‘Listening Ear’ must be developed by an utter concentration of all our spiritual powers — which requires time. Silent attention, with every spiritual sense alert, is the attitude of the worshiper who would hear the word of God.

In developing individual technique, the practice of the great mystics in their preparation for revelation furnishes some guidance. It was a process, occupying days or even weeks, by which the worshiper divested himself one by one of all his bodily and material desires and interests, using the intellect and the will to their uttermost limits, until, having eliminated every thought but the love of God, and with his whole personality concentrated on that conception, he made the final leap, surrendering absolutely to the will of God and becoming merged in complete communion. Something of this sort must take place, I think, in every individual when, turning away from his material work, he seeks that alternation, or communion with his God, which is necessary for his soul’s life. The method of preparation for this must be unique in every case. Some will find the best environment in their church, as the greatest symbol of their spiritual life; some in the star-lit heavens; some in gazing at the blue or snow-capped mountain, outlined against the sky, or the lonely desert, or the endless sea. It was the habit of Jesus, when he prayed, to go into the wilderness.

In the course of years, each man must learn, at the peril of his spiritual life, where and how best to develop the seeing eye and the listening ear and, having done so, he must frequently submerge himself in these conditions and surrender himself to silent worship. Obviously, however, this is not a condition of body and mind which can be attained by the worshiper in a few moments or a few hours. It is on a wholly different plane from the level of our daily lives. This process of ‘alternation,’ vital as it is, takes so long a time that it can be accomplished only at considerable intervals, and, for most men, can never become a part of their daily lives. The periods when we turn to God to adjust our spiritual courses must be systematic and periodic, but can hardly be daily. Such of us as are intended to do material rather than spiritual work must do it with such insight as our daily praying can afford, sustained and corrected at intervals more or less widely separated by periods of retirement and complete concentration on worship. Two things, therefore, become of vital import: that the technique of our daily prayer should be developed with such earnestness and intelligence as to make it as powerful as possible in the support and guidance of our daily work; and that the periodic ‘alternations’ should be sacredly observed, adequately protected, and, by the use of the highest skill possible to us, rendered as fruitful as our spiritual power will permit. Special periods must be set aside for them, with which nothing, not even illness, should interfere. In fact, if we fall ill such an alternation may prove to be the proper cure.

As a nation we surely have the vacation habit; men in all walks of life, even to the lowest, now take vacations liberally. But how do we spend them? Some of us alternate our city lives with a few weeks at a ‘Summer Resort,’ where jazzing and the movies, with fireworks and violent exercise, constitute our ‘relaxations.’ Others pack their wives and children into a motorcar, grasp the wheel, and proceed to tear off more miles per hour for more hours per day than any normal being ever before imagined. There are a favored few who can retire to great and beautiful country estates, and who do so for months on end. But even then they do not seek a revival and reorientation of the soul. The same round of material occupation goes on. We live in a burdensome luxury and in a whirl of social dissipation. The great American country houses are as laborious to manage as a summer hotel. Such an environment is not the atmosphere of high spiritual life.

Something far removed from this must be devised. The wise old Roman Catholic Church has offered one solution. For laymen as well as for priests it provides places of retreat; places of dignified and spiritual symbolism, to which the spiritually exhausted man may retire for a period of fasting and prayer, to cleanse and call home his spirit and prepare himself to serve again his God in the material world. Something of this sort is obviously necessary for us all as a beginning, and from this each soul must build up for itself, with its highest skill and will-power, a method of cleansing and purification which shall make possible a true communion with God.

Such a method of developing and feeding the spiritual body seems to me to be the cure for that disease of the soul from which I and many of my fellow men are suffering. It will, I think, cure the spiritual madness which I tried at the beginning to describe, and may enable us to save our tottering civilization by regaining control of the great scientific, mechanical, and industrial processes which have deprived us of liberty, the pursuit of happiness, and, almost, of life itself.